Simon Phipps of Sun has responded to the recent criticism of Sun's openness, pointing out that even releasing information that they may already have costs a lot of money. "Jonathan asked me to look into this, to ensure we're pursuing an open path across all of Sun, not simply the software group. We take all input seriously, and we can't solve all problems for all parties, but we're committed to doing our best to faithfully engage with all the communities we serve, in the same spirit as the existing Open Source Ombudsman Scheme. With the support of my team and others in the community I'll try to build a new scheme that is fair and transparent."

I am a SUN fan. If you go back through my posts you will read I wanted SUN to be the OSS darling, and not IBM.

But SUN's invlovement with SCO needs to explained. If it looks, walks, and quacks like a duck, more than likely, it's a duck. I'm too cynical to believe this is all coincidence. McNealy is gone now, so it's shouldn't be anything for Mr. Schwartz to just come out and be open about what happened. Otherwise it's a stumbling block. Ask yourself how can you fully trust someone who may have had involvement in a plot to subverse you in the past but won't talk about it when asked why? How can you? The obvious answer is you can't.

All they need to do is come clean about it. They don't even need to apologize, althought that would be nice, but they do need to come clean about it.

In the end, however, this is something that bolsters Theo's argument that SUN needs to do more to show they are really open. Because as it's stands, I don't trust SUN and I can't advise anyone interested in OSS to trust them either.